The word "Okay" in the default wake word "Okay Nabu" should probably be reconsidered

Configuration Voice Assistant
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I have three Home Assistant Voice PE units I am trying to level up from fun projects to being essential parts of the smart home. I have set up an OK environment for it, with both Wyoming-Piper and Kokoro-Wyoming/Speaches, as well as Ollama. I am still eager for the future of the Home Assistant Voice PE and future editions. I find it all quite impressive, but not always as usable. I would not take up this issue except I think it can’t be fixed unless someone does.

Home Assistant Assist comes with five wake words/phrases.
The Voice PE has three of these, “Hey Jarvis”, “Hey Mycroft” and “Okay Nabu”. Some might have expected to see “Alexa” and “Hey Rhasspy” on the list as well, since those are available in Assist. I believe to recognize some of the issues that reduced this list from five to three. I am going to assume that Home Assistant / Nabu Casa will want to keep this list short for this generation of hardware, and there’s the effort it takes to train a wake word.

I am sure Nabu Casa recognizes that many households that want to enable voice assistant through Home Assistant Cloud or locally, in particularly those who would actually buy a Voice PE, already have Android or iOS smart phones as well as probably Alexa and Google Home devices in their household. Some may also have used Rhasspy for a while.

Because of this, the wake words “Hey Rhasspy”, “Alexa”, “Hey Siri” and “Okay Google” are problematic to use with Home Assistant. If these were enabled, they would trigger a lot of smart home devices and smart phones outside of Home Assistant/Nabu Casa’s control.

My problem here is with Android and Google Home devices. Whenever I say “Okay Nabu”, the chance of triggering a false positive on my Android phone or Google Hub is almost as high as a true positive on my Voice PE. I mean, maybe as much as 80% of the time the Google Hub will reply. I try to set a timer with the Voice PE, and the Google Hub will without fail set a timer. I would love to know what the Voice PE responds but I can’t hear because the Google Hub answers at the same time.

This has a chilling effect on my adaptation. I have one device with the wake word “Hey Jarvis”, but I have under 50% trigger rate on that. I had one device with the wake word “Hey Mycroft”, but for some reason that threw a lot of false positives. Both of these can probably be improved with the new setting for wake word sensitivity. But we can’t change the false positives from Google Home devices.

I try to say this as humbly as I can, but I think Nabu Casa should give way here, and change the wake word “Okay Nabu”. The issue with it can’t be configured or fixed by the users, the developers nor Nabu Casa itself. Custom Wake Words wouldn’t help either, considering onboarding. And even if some might expect good Home Assistant users to throw away functioning Google Home speakers, the mass of overlapping Android users can’t be ignored.

It’s not like it’d need to be a loss for Nabu Casa. There’s no reason not to keep “Nabu”, we just need to replace “Okay” with something as easily recognizable. Even “Nabu Casa” would probably work just fine - if possibly feel a bit schizophrenic for the company employees.

I apologize for throwing in too many arguments and creating a wall of text. It’s probably because English is not my first language :wink:

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You are free to change your wake word…

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Hi, thanks for taking your time. I appreciate the option to be able to use custom wake words.

However that doesn’t help with the issue with the default wake word. New users or users with a Voice PE does by default have three provided wake words. Of them, in my experience, ‘Okay, Nabu’ is well trained and triggers with the best balance of false positives and false negatives of the three. However, that’s all a bit of a waste if almost every time you use this default wake word, it also triggers android and google devices. Which it does. New users will not get a good first experience if the default wake word also triggers their Google Home devices. Now, if the pre-trained wake word was ‘Hey Nabu’ instead of ‘Okay Nabu’, that first experience would be smoother for anyone with an Android or Google device listening for ‘Okay Google’. Of course, it’s because ‘Okay Google’ has way too many false positives, not Nabu Casas fault, but the end result is that I can’t use ‘Okay Nabu’ near a Home mini or Hub.

Edit: I have been made aware that Google devices also respond to ‘Hey Google’ in addition to ‘Okay Google’, so my proposed alternative ‘Hey Nabu’ wouldn’t help the issue after all.

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Honestly I couldn’t care less about what a Google or Amazon device misfires on. That’s thier problem and I fail to see why that’s Nabus issue as well.

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No, it isn’t Google’s problem. It’s the problem of new users, and by extention, the community that wants this device to succeed. Infact, it is Google that shouldn’t care less, they win if we don’t.

That said, for individual users we can all get around it by not using Google Products, disabling ‘Okay Google’ on our phones or using another wake word. But that’s sidestepping the fact that the default wake word has an inherit issue.

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No not really… I’m putting mine int to REPLACE them. And have already muted the Amazon one. Never had Google.

A vendor has tk draw a line at what they care about. They chose to have a recogable name (hey I hate it too why I’m on the build my own wake word kick) and make sure they have few false positives great. And honesty what they should care about.

If worrying about other vendors false positive adds time to the dev cycle… If I’m the PM I veto those tasks every single time (also, ex dev manager). I’d say thier pm made exactly the right call.

How it falses on someone else’s gear is something you worry about for v. 2 or v.3

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I am happy that you can get away from the cloud. I think you can see the issue with having a default wake word that doesn’t work well for millions of Android or Google Home users, even if you have the know-how to sidestep it.

I must have been working as CPO in a smaller company than you, because if our choice created issues for the users, we considered that our responsibility.

Anyway, I thank you again for taking your time to share your opinion on my suggestion. Even should they reconsider it, as I suggested, it doesn’t mean they’ll agree with me. ^^;

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I don’t see it as creating issues. I see it as a feature that the others false positive.

And Yes one of the big four. Literally they’d drop it. Because $. The HA dev team and esphome have even less of it. Dev cycles are a PREMIUM ESPECIALLY for a product you’re tossing out as a preview (the P in VPE) edition.

We all like to think how I (pointing at yourself) do it is the right way and everyone else has the exact same problems we do. Unfortunately… Reality and math tells us that that’s not the case.

So if you’re running a dev shop lean and mean and you intend to have a successful product you make decisions. Often unpopular ones (see killing Supervised also the right decision from a dev PM perspective)

But I can assure you that caring if yojr competition false positives accidentally because of a choice ‘my’ (if I were thier pm) team mde is not one of them and for some of the teams I’ve worked with if they were told they’d actually lean in to it.

The difference is with the esphome guys you have open code and a way to change what you don’t like. The other company… They chuckle about it and move on… Trust me. I’ve seen it happen.

Someone mentioned to me something about open source that I need to remind myself of a lot. Open source is kind of like an open kitchen in a really nice restaurant.

You can look in and see how Chef is making the food. Even comment as we enjoy. Doesn’t mean you are gonna jump in and start cooking. If you want to, ok - theres the French manual start learning mother sauces and prove me a bechamel. Then we’ll talk about my technique on the Mac n cheese.

They can’t care about the competition until later versions if it matters at all. Else in this economy they disappear. I’m happy they’re making the hard decisions… AND giving us choices.

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I think there is a point in case it triggers all the Android phones out there.
We have more or less 2 big players for mobile platforms: Apple and Android.
HA doesn’t have one, so you can’t replace your phone with a HASS phone. :wink:

And with mobiles you would also have this problems with all your guests using Android phones.
Maybe you should care as the developer of the newer device, as Android and Hey Google has been out there for a way longer time.

But I haven’t heard about that from anyone else so far, and there aren’t a lot reactions on this thread.
Is this is really a problem? No one else seeing this on their side?
I’m an Apple user, so I can’t tell.

(I would think Nabu and Google are so different that it shouldn’t be a problem, but as a german speaking guy, what do I know about english accent :stuck_out_tongue:)

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Many, maybe most Android users do not have the voice assistant enabled or this would have been a bigger issue. It’s a bigger issue if you have and want to keep having a Home Mini or Home Hub as part of your smart home.

My accent is Norwegian, but the root cause is that Google Assistant is way to happy to be triggered and ‘okay’ + 2 syllables is close enough.

I don’t want to push my opinion on Nabu Casa or anyone, but the wake word really doesn’t work well when I have a Google/Nest Hub nearby. And it’s not cheap to replace a setup of several Google Hubs.

If I can fix this with changing to another wake word or even custom wake words, that fixes one installation. I am talking about the entire customer segment. And I will object if people say it’s not an issue or that it’s Google’s problem, because that is not true. I won’t object to people saying it’s not important or prioritized.

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I don’t use voice via Google or HA, so take the following with a pinch of salt…

According to…erm…Google, Google assistant is also triggered by “Hey Google”. Not sure what changing the wake word in HA to “Hey Nabu” will fix. It’ll simply false trigger off a different wake word.

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The OPs complaint feels like such a non-issue to me. Currently, Home Assistant is not an “out of the box experience”. If you can set up home assistant, you can use a drop down menu to change the wake word.

Though if I were the designer, I probably would not have chosen “Okay” either, just for the “also me” factor. shrug. but again, very much a non-issue.

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Oh. Well, then it’d require more research than I did, I guess.

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‘Okay Nabu’ appears to be the best trained wake word on the device, for my accent anyway. ‘Hey Jarvis’ works half the time and for some reason ‘Hey Mycroft’ triggers with a lot of false positives for me. Both of which can probably be tuned to work better with the new settings - unlike the google assistant overlap. That said, I do not want to present this like it’s a major issue. I say that I think they should reconsider it as it is their primary wake word and it causes issues for users who also use another major platform. I brought up the issue, I don’t demand anyone to agree with it. If everybody’s okay with that, I can live with it too.

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I speculate that the logic of “Okay” is because it is in usage in a very large number of languages, so it’s usage is still going to be familiar to more non-english speaking users. Other words may not have that same wide cross-cultural adoption, so may not be as approachable.

I personally like the single word “Alexa” choice amazon made. It does have a lot of false positives though, so their software has to notice you’re not actually talking to it (which it does pretty well at).

Since your experience has been not great, it might be worth trying to train a custom wake word. I recall there is a way to so it, though Ive yet to try.

Personally, I vote for only “Nabu”, but you have to say it like they said “yahooooOooOoOo” in the old yahoo commercials :stuck_out_tongue:

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okay nabu works better than all the others, sometimes the others dont respond and I have to shout them, not so with ok nabu.

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My experience is similar, ‘okay nabu’ works best of the three.

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It looks like I am the only one who has a problem with overlapping responses with Google Home units, and I never wanted to make this into a big thing so I am closing it as a ‘me’ thing. Thanks to everyone for the opinions.